Exchanging (or reciprocal) Links

[Scottish Business Owner]

You see this type of question all over various forums about the merits of exchanging links etc. One of the blogs I visit alot is Hobo Web who are a Scottish based SEO but really without all the waffle and stuff.

I've linked below to a post by their SEO guy Shaun Anderson (who's a top bloke and already given me a few tips). It's a kind of no nonsense appraisal of reciprocal linking etc

Reciprocal Links With Unrelated Websites Who Email You Out Of The Blue? No Thanks. | Hobo

Would love to hear others thoughts - do you agree/disagree?

 

[Adventurelife]

Shaun knows his stuff

I look at like this

I only link out if it is going to help the visitors to my site. If someone is on one of my sites I can 100% tell you they are not thinking about buying car insurance, drugs, hotels in countries I do not operate in or a hundred other things I am not involved in.

However, as the web gets more difficult for companies to compete and the big boys are starting to pay serious money. I am turning down 4 figure annual income from companies that want to pay for links. However, as tempting as it seems it would destroy what I have been building so it is not going to happen.

Link building is getting harder , fact quality link building is getting exceedingly hard.

You have to give the owner of a site a reason to link to you and that reason best be in his/hers interest and also their customer interest. Take away financial incentive and that is a hard thing to do.

The SEO guys get focused on links that drive SEO value and so they should if you are paying them. I focus on links I can influence and what drive quality converting traffic. The SEO benefit may be minor or zero from them but if they send traffic that converts that is more important.

Examples

Our 2nd best converting link to our Morocco business comes from a link from a customer who posted onto a quality tourism grading website which is nofollow . Only google search drives more business.

Currently creating about 100 links from Scottish tourism businesses, they each only drive small amounts of traffic but a % will convert and as a group it is valuable. The SEO benefit is not going to do much but that is not our aim.

Like more and more these days you need to have projects within projects so a link building project is and should have several different aims.